Wealth & Money Quote by Gunther Schuller

A throwaway comparative, delivered with a composer’s dry economy, that quietly encodes an entire career arc. Schuller isn’t praising New York so much as measuring density: how many rooms, bands, scenes, and micro-traditions can coexist within walking distance. Cincinnati, in his telling, is already “rich” in live music - not a cultural backwater, but a place with real institutions, working players, and nightly sound. Then comes the pivot: New York was “even more.” No flourish, no mythmaking, just an almost statistical escalation that lands harder because it’s understated.

The subtext is competition and gravity. Mid-century American music had multiple strongholds, but New York functioned as a magnet that didn’t merely attract talent; it concentrated it, forcing styles to collide. For Schuller, whose life was spent arguing that “high” and “low” were false borders (Third Stream wasn’t a gimmick; it was a wager), New York represents proximity as an aesthetic engine. You don’t have to romanticize a scene when you can simply note its saturation.

Context matters: Schuller came up as a working musician and intellectual organizer, fluent in the orchestral world and the improviser’s world. The line reads like a personal origin story in miniature: a young artist leaving a musically serious city for a city where seriousness multiplies, where the cost of admission is constant comparison. “Even more” is the point - New York isn’t better by decree; it’s louder, faster, and harder to ignore.